If you have opinions about the subject matter of posts on this blog please share them. Do you have a story about how the system affects you at work school or home, or just in general? This is a place to share it.

Tuesday, July 8, 2014

Kshama Sawant/SA: Big gains--possible pitfalls

Tony Benn at Militant/CWI conference during Miner's Strike

By Sean O’Torrain and Richard Mellor

Socialist Alternative (SA), the organization to which Kshama Sawant belongs and
the driving force behind her election to Seattle City Council and the $15NOW
campaign, faces a great opportunity. It has grown dramatically and is widely
know among activists and youth. Its victory in Seattle and its very good vote
in Minneapolis has given it authority and respect. This is very good and all
anti-capitalist activists and those seeking to change the present system should
unconditionally congratulate it on its success.

However! It was Trotsky who said that any change in the
objective situation or in the subjective factor itself tended to express itself
in internal debate and struggle within the revolutionary organization. This is
what is beginning to open up in the SA now. This is a positive thing but how
the leadership responds to it is the key. We are also including an article
below about the internal life of the Bolsheviks by a former leading member of
the CWI in Britain. This article is of extreme importance in helping us negotiate
the various ideas and debates, strategies and tactics that are now swirling
around the heads of the membership of the SA. We would most strongly ask
Comrades to read it. It is more important than this short introduction here.

The SA has grown dramatically mainly due to its continued
correct orientation to the working class as expressed through its $15.00
minimum wage struggle. But it is now faced with a new and welcome challenge; how
to integrate these new members. People like ourselves concluded after a long
period of interaction with the CWI that its internal life was not democratic.
Trotsky said that the healthy period of the life of the Bolsheviks was a period
of factions, and not only that, but factions within factions. (See article
below) The CWI never embraced this position. So people like the authors of this
post concluded that if the CWI/SA was going to grow to become a large
organization, never mind a semi mass or mass organization it would have to
change its internal life. This is the case with all of the traditional
left or socialist groupings.

We ask the reader to think about this for a moment. The
larger the SA becomes the more opinions there will be, the more debate and
discussion there will be. This is inevitable and natural and healthy. It is to
be welcomed. The test for the CWI/SA leadership is whether or not it is able
to accommodate all these different opinions. The history of the leadership
of the CWI/SA shows that unless it changes its internal life it will not. Its
history shows that it will try and stamp down on different opinions and views.
This will lead to splits, expulsions, fragmentation and members walking away in
demoralization.

Look at the history of the largest section of the CWI when
the CWI was at its height with up to 14,000 members. Its largest section was in
Britain where it had 8 to 10 thousand members. What happened? It shattered into
pieces. Its powerful Scottish section was driven out; its powerful Liverpool
section was driven out. It’s leadership of the Poll Tax movement atrophied and
come to just about nothing. The CWI had a member in the leadership of the
largest civil service union in Britain and also published for a while a paper,
“The Panther” that we used to sell here in the US.What happened to these efforts? Most importantly, we argued for years that
capitalism would never return to the Soviet Union. We were grossly
mistaken.Has there been a serious
internal discussion about this huge miscalculation and how it could occur?

Of course there was the objective situation, but the
objective situation doesn’t explain everything.All too often, spokespersons and theoreticians of the left explain our
dismal history, our failure to make any permanent and lasting mark on the
working class and its organizations, on objective factors.“We just got the perspective wrong” is often
the explanation.There is a powerful
obstacle to discussing in any way, shape or form, the internal life of
socialist organizations, what we did wrong, what mistakes we made, the
undemocratic methods and entrenched leadership.We have nothing to learn from the past it seems.

But a central factor in the collapse of the CWI from around
14,000 members to around 2,000 members was that the internal life of the
organization could not accommodate different views and allow for factions
and could not see these as inevitable and natural at that time of great changes
in the objective situation and also the growth within its own ranks.

We would ask Comrades in the SA, especially new Comrades: have you heard
discussion about these events, the drastic fall in influence and membership of
the CWI, the reasons for this etc?Here
in the US we had leading people in the trade unions at one time and were on the
verge of building a genuine opposition caucus, a broad left if you like, in one
of the AFL-CIO’s largest unions, AFSCME.Why did this fail?We played an
influential role in Anthony Mazzochi’s call for a Labor Party in the US during
the 1980’s and 90’s. What lessons have been discussed within the CWI about
these major interventions?

The SA will not be able to become a large organization,
never mind a semi mass or mass organization unless it changes its internal
life. If it continues as it is then it will fragment and split and there will
be expulsions and demoralization. The SA membership must not underestimate the
determination with which its leadership will hold on to its positions. It will
do so no matter what damage it does to the organization as a whole. It will put
its own interests above that of the organization and the working class. It has
done so before and it will do so again unless it is stopped by its
membership. Any organization that has the same leader for half a century
is not a healthy organization.

What has to be done now to build on the very good work of
the SA is to change the internal life of the The image included
here is that of Labor Party icon, Tony Benn speaking at the Militant (CWI)
conference at Wembley during the British Miner’s Strike (1984-85) It was taken
by one of the authors on this blog. Also on the podium are pretty much the same
individuals that lead the CWI 30 years later as well as a young woman member
who was on the executive of the British Labor Party, a party that has governed
a nation.She is no longer in the CWI
but the reader can imagine the excitement young people felt at such a
spectacle. So you see, there have been such successes in the past.

SA.
-->
It
must be made democratic, it must be opened up to different views and factions
must be allowed and accepted as natural democratic debate has to occur in the
branches and upward. It this does not happen then the success of the SA will be
like a shooting star which flares up in the night sky only to lose its
brightness and pass by. Those of us who either left or were driven out remember
being as excited and hopeful as many new young members must be in the wake of
the Sawant and $15NOW campaign

The tendency for the CWI leadership and Sawant/$15 NOW
campaign to rely too much on the left or liberal wing of the labor hierarchy or
to broaden the campaign or control it from the top down rather than build a
broader movement will ensure that the success so far will be for nought as
democratic debate among the membership and aggressive and independent thinkers
are shut down and the movement retreats.

For sharing these views we will be labeled as people with an
axe to grind or disgruntled members and other such personal remarks.But that’s not a new thing.We are socialists, we want to change society,
rid ourselves of this rotten system that is destroying the planet and likely
life as we know it. We simply believe we have to learn form our past and our
mistakes not just champion short-term gains.

Here is the very useful and interesting piece on the internal life of the Bolsheviks during their healthy period.

Bolshevik Internal
Life and Democracy

The Internal Life of the Bolshevik Party: Now let’s briefly
look at the internal life of the Bolshevik Party during this period.
There is another myth that the Bolshevik Party was a tightly controlled,
highly centralised organisation. In fact, the external refugee leadership
located abroad was far removed from the party membership inside the Russian
empire for very obvious practical reasons: huge distances, poor communications
and severe state repression. As many historians have demonstrated, the social
democratic workers on the ground tended to ignore the splits among the refugees
abroad, and thus Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, and other factions worked
together in Russia in the same organisations, only separating during the
open struggles in 1917.

On the question of debate, Pravda, the Bolsheviks’ daily
newspaper in the period before the War often carried material that made Lenin’s
hair stand on end. In this the paper was reflecting the various moods that
existed among party members and party organisations. These ranged from the
orthodox positions of the party all the way over to Menshevik ideas. It took
Lenin a long time to secure an editorial board more representative of the
party’s programme.

During the 1917 revolution itself, there were fierce and
fundamental public arguments even about the very aims of the revolution. These
were reflected in the many party newspapers.

Let’s take the example of Lenin’s April Theses. In the
first weeks of the revolution the leadership of the Bolshevik wing of the
social democrats adopted a similar political position to the Mensheviks. They
supported the Provisional Government and even were flirting with the idea of
supporting the war effort ‘on democratic grounds’. They were also moving
towards a merger between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks and had agreed a joint
conference to discuss the question. Lenin had heard about this backsliding and
was hopping mad about it. Thus, instead of happily greeting old Bolshevik
comrades that he met en route back to Russia he tore into them with a fierce
critique.

It was in this mood that Lenin arrived in Petrograd in early
April. As has been attested to by various accounts, when Lenin arrived at the
train station he turned his back on the Soviet welcoming committee which
included representative of the various left and liberal parties. Mounting an
armoured truck he addressed the crowd directly, laying into the Provisional Government,
calling for its downfall, and for a socialist revolution. In doing so he was
obviously breaking with the democratic centralist rules of the party which
according to the Leninist and Trotskyist movement today forbids party members
from expressing disagreements in public.

But for Lenin, the fate of the revolution was the paramount consideration.
After shocking both party members and the representatives of the rival parties,
he proceeded to the Bolshevik party headquarters where he addressed a large
crowd outside, repeating his criticisms of party policy. Then he went down to
the basement where he berated an internal gathering of party cadres and called
for a change of direction. The account we have of this was written by Sukhanov,
a left Menshevik member of the Soviet Executive Committee, who was specifically
given permission by the Bolshevik leaders including Lenin to attend the
internal Bolshevik cadre meeting.

So much for party
secrecy!

The next day, a conference had been arranged by the Petrograd
Soviet to discuss reunification of the Social Democratic Party. Lenin appeared
at the conference and marched up to the platform to launch into a furious
denunciation of the conference and the idea of reunification. Sukhanov again
reported how “at the beginning of his speech Lenin had definitely said and even
emphasized that he was speaking for himself personally, without having
consulted his party.” Where is the practice here that forbids party members
from disagreeing in public?

It might be said that Lenin was only repeating long-held
party policy and it was the internal party leadership who were out of step. But
Lenin was actually arguing for a totally new policy: a socialist revolution in
backward Russia. When this concept had been put forward by Trotsky many years
before in his theory of Permanent Revolution, Lenin with the support of the
Bolshevik faction had strongly resisted it. This policy continued up until the
outbreak of the February Revolution. However, it was the practical tasks posed
by the revolutionary situation of 1917 that caused Lenin to adopt the main part
of Trotsky’s strategy.

Lenin’s new programme which came to be known as the April
Theses, was submitted to Pravda. It was published on April 7 but only under
Lenin’s signature. The next day Kamenev replied in an editorial statement
entitled ‘Our Disagreements’. This “disassociated the Bolshevik leadership from
Lenin’s position, stating that it represented his own private views which were
shared neither by the editorial board of Pravda nor by the Bureau of the
Central Committee.”

Once again we must ask where was the application of a rule
that forbade public disagreement? Or would the present leaderships of the
Leninist and Trotskyist groups who insist on this rule have preferred that Lenin
not publicly campaign for the policy that opened the way to the October
Revolution?

There are many other examples of public disagreement that
occurred in the Bolshevik Party before the revolution. It was precisely this
open atmosphere that allowed many people who had previously disagreed with the
Bolsheviks, such as Trotsky and his comrades in the Inter-District Group, to
join the party during the course of 1917. The recruitment of these former
opponents of the party was an important factor in the success of the revolution
with their members going on to contribute a large section of the future
leadership during and after the October revolution.

Comparing the Bolshevik Experience With the Party Strategy
of the Leninist Movement today: The Russian Social Democratic and Labour Party
(majority) was a mass movement which had established itself as the main party
of the working class for at least five years before the revolution. It was only
the severe repression of the Tsarist state that prevented the party from maintaining a very large
membership. As soon as the repression was lifted in February 1917 the gates
were opened for hundreds of thousands of militant workers and youth to stream
into the party. This is a world away from the masonic one by one ‘invitation-only’
recruitment policy of the revolutionary groups today. Somehow these groups
believe that when a pre-revolutionary situation arises they will be able to
quickly rise from being a small vanguard group generally unknown to the mass of
workers to rapidly become the leadership of the working class. This is as far
removed from what happened in the Russian Revolution as it is possible to
imagine. It just will not happen like this. And that is without even
considering the fact that in most cases there will already be established mass
working class parties who already have the ear of the workers. As Al
Richardson, the founder of Revolutionary History, put it so succinctly:

"Mass revolutionary parties have never been built by
recruitment in ones and twos to a sect, or even by an accumulation of such
sects."

The differences between the Bolsheviks and the model of party that dominates
the Leninist and Trotskyist movement today also apply to their internal life.
The Bolshevik Party was not a monotone organisation but included many different
tendencies and allowed public debate of its differences.

It is the task of scientific socialists today to
develop an organized wing of the movement with the aim of winning a majority in
the mass organisations of working people. For this it shouldn’t seek to hide
significant differences within itself but find a way to constructively involve
working people in discussing them. It is only on this basis that a credible
alternative can be offered to society and the forces amassed to achieve the end
of capitalism.